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[December 29, 1999]
Jeyanthy and I have been busing around this part of Tamil Nadu, once to Thiripur, and twice to Erode, about one and two hours from Coimbatore, respectively. Thiripur was to a friend of appa's from when he was in India for college (late 50s?), Dr. Kundaswamy. They spent most of a day together talking (which was great for appa). Dr. Kundaswamy and his wife, Sarojini, both grew up outside Thiripur, in rural areas, and took us to visit relatives in and near the houses/villages they grew up in. Being basically an urban/suburban boy, such visits are always interesting for me; I've been to farms before, but not for a while, and in the U.S. not South Asia (except for seeing some of the rural scene in Jaffna when we went to Ceylon in '97). We saw sugar cane being crushed for the juice, then rendered somehow in one and then another of these two giant (15' across?) wok-shaped metal bowls. One of the things I liked was some things being used every last bit. For example, we saw coconuts being dried in preparation for extracting oil. The husk (which I used to not know existed, as all the coconuts one sees in U.S. stores have had it removed) is put through a machine which separates the fibers, which are used to make rope. A reddish-brown powder left over from that is made into a brick-shaped soil-like medium for young plants (I guess if any of the husk makes it to the U.S., it's in that form).
We went out to some land that some of their relatives own and got fresh coconuts for elenni (the liquid inside coconuts, this was a particular kind of coconut in which it tastes really good), palam (fruit), and wild kida (spinach). Some aspects of Y2k we do not worry about here, as long as we can escape the city to stay with thse friends :-). At some other relatives' house we saw a small power-loom set up weaving cotton cloth, and one guy hand-weaving saris (well, one sari takes a few days, so we just saw one). Near there we saw yet more relatives' chicken farm, developing in a familiarly industrial way, each new building housing the chickens ever more densely, injecting with medicines, artificial instead of natural insemination, etc. More reasons to be a happy vegetarian (well, I still eat fish--maybe I should visit a fish farm). Mostly people were impressed by my minimal Tamil, and everyone fed us wonderful food, including some chewy wild mushrooms. Mmmm.
Back in Thiripur we visited Dr. Ramaswamy's hospital ("only" two doctors, but two operating rooms -- or theatres as they say here -- and room for plenty of patients, there seem to be a lot of hospitals that size here). They have the latest--mm, can't remember the name, but the equipment for surgery where instead of cutting you completely open, they make little cuts and insert tubes with light, fiber-optic camera, and surgical tools and do the surgery by television. Also did a little clothes shopping in Thiripur town (this whole area is famous for textiles).
Erode is the regional office for OfERR, an NGO servicing and largely run by Sri Lankan Tamils in refugee camps in India. We went once for a day to check things out again, and again for a few days, to do interviews (I talked about this in my first e-mail) and help them out with our computer expertise. Of course, there's this mismatch of they have Wintel and my experience is primarily with Macs. Worse, their most pressing problem was with getting online, likely a modem problem. I did notice that their Pentium had a 1992 BIOS and asked if they'd checked for Y2k problems (nope).
Fortunately (for us being able to be helpful at all), they had the whole thing replaced with a new modem and new Celeron-based (Celeron is Intel's fancy name for a low-end Pentium) computer, and had no online problems by the time of our second visit. That's if you don't count the 15 tries before getting through to their net service provider. There are multiple ISPs in India, but in general outside of big cities (which Erode is not), you're stuck with the government ISP, VSNL. Anyway, we got one hour in at the end of one day showing them how to create web pages (I'd never seen Front Page, Microsoft's graphical web page creator, before, but that's never stopped me :-)
The next day, their new monitor had some really weird shadow-y effects. We tried an old monitor and got the same effect. I tried opening their PC and taking out and putting back in their video card, and it looked the vertical hold had gone crazy (hope I didn't break anything). We waited around a while for a repair-person to show up then left to catch a bus in time to get home at a reasonable hour. We'll try to help them at their main office when we're in Chennai (aka Madras) again. We may as well have waited a while longer, as our bus got stuck in a kilometers-long traffic jam, due to an accident between another bus and a lorry (that's not Tamil; it's truck in South Asian/British English).
Did I mention that technology always seems to be an adventure here? People are so used to the power going out that in many contexts no one even looks up. I shouldn't complain, as a result there's more redundancy (e.g. generators everywhere--although that's no use if there's no oil), another reason to be more Y2k complacent here, besides the relatively small connection to the global economy. That has been shifting significantly recently, but it is still less than "developed" countries. Aiyo, thank goodness the *speculation* part of our Y2k worries will end soon. Of course, isn't it disaster enough that ~trillion dollars are being spent to fix the technical problems, and trillions more expected for the legal mess? This is not value-added spending, no matter how the economists count it.
Ahem, back to our regularly scheduled program...
Our helping them was not only out of the goodness of our hearts, but also somewhat in exchange for them helping us to connect with refugees (including some of them) to interview. This we did, entirely in Tamil (ignore the white guy, he's just the camera man :-), so you'll have to hear from Jeyanthy for any substantial content, although I can say that one interesting interview was with a Sinhalese woman! She had married a Tamil man and moved to a Tamil area, and thus ended up in a refugee camp in Tamil-speaking India (she spoke fluent Tamil, too). Actually, some of the Tamil in people's answers is beyond Jeyanthy's, so we will both learn more once these interviews are transcribed and translated into English (hopefully while we're here).
In general, Ceylon Tamils in camps in Tamil Nadu are poorer refugees. Those with the means usually do their best to get away to Western, Middle Eastern or Southeast Asian countries, where they can make a decent income. There's also a disproportionately high number of refugees here who are Christian (as compared to the general Sri Lankan Tamil population), due to caste (poorer generally goes with lower caste, and in South Asia lower castes typically are more prone to conversion), and region (missionaries did a lot of work on the west coast of Sri Lanka, which is the closest part of Sri Lanka to India). Most of the refugees we've talked with came over around 1990, I guess in the wake of the India's military attempt to solve the problems in Sri Lanka.
The most memorable interview for me so far was at a camp where the children had no school because of their exam schedule, and all through the interviews we were surrounded by kids and a few moms. I felt bad after a while asking people to be quiet (I'm the sound man too), as some took it as their responsibility then to hit those making noise. It was nice to be in such a lively setting though, plenty of kallahullapoo (the noise/ambience of many people together being social). Please note that my Roman alphabet spellings are deeply non-standard, and a compromise between what I know of the standards for spelling Tamil in Roman, and my own idea of how to spell so you'll know how the words sound (for those of you who aren't Tamil speakers in the first place :-).
Whoops, 4:30, time to shut the windows in a vain attempt to keep out the noolumboo (mosquito, in Ceylon Tamil). Remind me to send an e-mail some time just about insects...
If you've been following the news, you know that Sri Lanka/Ceylon/Ilangai/that big island off the coast of India (names too are political) has recently seen an election, assassination attempts (same day Sluggo was shot), and fighting moving closer to Jaffna. We're keeping an eye on it, but are still likely to go, to the south at least, in mid/early January. Paapum (we'll see).
Life,
John